Rarities 07-09

I have uploaded the rarities album that I've been talking about, so it's all available and stuff! You can buy it HERE.

It's 8 tracks, five full songs and three instrumentals, and I'm trying something new with the way I'm selling it - you can choose the price. I have set a minimum of £1 so I don't lose money on it! But other than that it's totally up to you. I'm gonna give £5 as a suggested price but if people can't afford that they are welcome to buy for whatever they can, and if you can afford more, well that would be very helpful!

All the money will be going on my music, but that's fairly obvious because pretty much all of my money does.

This is the first time I've put an album exclusively on bandcamp, so I'd be very interested to hear what your experience is with it... Especially if anybody wants to buy it but doesn't have access to paypal or any of the other payment options. If that is the case, please let me know what online payment options you can use and I'll see if I can set something up with them.

Thanks!

xxx

Website

I've just started a little discussion on facebook asking people to give input on my website plans. I'm just looking at what content should be on there. The tabs I have down right now are...

Home - Music - Pictures - Lyrics/Tabs - Free Stuff - Store - Links

So Home will include news, latest release info, possibly my most recent video, upcoming gigs...

Music will be a discography with links to buy.

Pictures include artwork, live pics and fan pics (with either an email address to send them in to or an uploader if that's not difficult!)

Lyrics/Tabs is obvious.

Free Stuff will be downloads of songs, ringtones, wallpapers... Any other suggestions are welcome.

'Store' links to the big cartel.

And 'Links' contains contact info and links to my other sites.


Some things that have come up are a bio and a blog. I'm not sure about writing a bio because it wouldn't be all that interesting, but let me know if you think a band site needs one. And I originally kept a blog out because, well I have this obviously, but thought it was a bit more personal than the sort of thing you'd put on a band website. So what do you think? Should I put this blog on there, put a separate blog on there - less personal, more about music and the band, or not put a blog on there? I will have the news section on the home page either way.

So let me know,
Bio or no bio.
This blog, new blog or no blog.
Free Stuff - anything I can give away for free that won't cost me anything!
Any other ideas.

THANKS! =)

Hurray!

My rant earlier obviously worked... I'm writing this from my new 24" iMac!

It's so big I can't even look at the whole screen. just areas of it! And they just brought out 27 inchers as well, imagine that! Pretty much ridiculous. I can't decide whether or not I'm gutted that I didn't wait and get a new one. They are cheaper than I thought they'd be, but still to get what I did including the extras would have set me back an extra few hundred quid, and there's not much difference. Not compared to the difference between this and my old one. Definitely not bothered about missing out on a 27 inch screen... Wouldn't fit on my desk! The new mouse looks very cool though.

Right now I'm just downloading and installing programs. I still have a few things that need sorting, for example the firewire on this is too modern for my old junk! So I need to get an adapter for that, and I've ordered a hard drive dock so hopefully I can get at all my old files.

Ahhh my old iMac didn't have an isight! I might start being on dailybooth more! And making videos will be easier.

EXCITED.

An explanation for the increase in blogging

You may have noticed I've been blogging fairly regularly lately. That's because I have NOTHING TO DO!

Well actually I have a shit load of things to do, I just can't do them until my iMac gets here. It's really frustrating. Usually I don't think of myself as a particularly productive person, but I'm starting to see how much stuff I do now that I can't do it!

I'm so excited about it now though. I've been needing a new machine for ages. Jack was at least five years old and it was beginning to show. Especially video editing, using layers basically meant final cut wouldn't play back, so I had to work blind. And as for my pc (Tim) well he's a similar age and curls up into a ball on the floor if placed under the slightest bit of pressure. By which I mean he crashes if you play a flash game, or open two programs at once. When Tim crashes I move on to my parents laptop, which runs vista. Enough said.

I CAN'T WAIT!

In other news, I want to get that rarities album up during the postal strike because The Royal Mail can't fuck up downloads. But of course I need the iMac before I can do that. Oh God! What if my iMac gets caught up in the postal strike?! I would actually just start going around killing people.

iMacs

So I got the hard drive, installed it and... It didn't work. Well, the same thing happened as did before. I'm pretty sure I fit it properly and all that, I just think that it wasn't what was causing the problem. The guy said it might also be one of the wires attached to it, so that's still a possibility.

But either way, my parents talked me into buying a new one. Since I was planning to get one anyway as soon as I could afford it, they said they'd lend me the money as it'd be a waste of time putting it off for a couple of months and trying to push my old iMac even further. They're right really, and especially as I'm just starting a studio album - it would be annoying to switch machines halfway through a project like that.

So I found a great deal tonight on a refurbished 24" iMac. I checked with Dale (I run anything that's both technical and expensive by the gadget dude before buying it!) and he had nothing against buying refurbished machines, plus it has Apple Care until 2012, so it's all good... And yeah, I bought it.

Now I have to wait for it to get here and I'm gonna be like a kid in the run up to Christmas! It - he - is gonna be called Mark Morrison, and if anyone gets that reference I pretty much love you. As for Jack (which wasn't a reference, it just rhymes) I'll probably still get him fixed and sell him, if I can bring myself to part with him! The spare hard drive I could sell, or I might just turn it into an external.

In other news, the post today included a box full of CD's and t-shirts from my friends, 'Rook and The Ravens' because when I was up in Manchester the other day I offered to sell them through Scratch That Records. They are one of the main bands I was thinking of when I said I could use it to sell friend's music as well as my own, and I'm so excited about the album, it's actually amazing. As in, objectively one of the best albums of the year, not just from people I know!

So that's one job for tomorrow - adding their stuff to the store. I hope people buy it because it's so fucking good!

Alright, off to bed.

xxx

Apple

So I went to The Apple Store in Leicester and had a chat with the Genius guy. He was actually very nice and helpful. He seemed fairly certain that it was a problem with the hard drive, and said they could fix it for about £140 and 10 - 14 days. But he also said it's not that difficult and that I could probably manage it myself, so I'm gonna try that.

It was very refreshing to hear someone talk me through all of the options - not just the ones that are beneficial to the company they work for. He could easily have told me that attempting to change it myself would be very difficult and would most likely end up with me electrocuting myself and frying my iMac and that I should definitely pay Apple to do it - I'd have believed him! But when I got home I had a look and it does look fairly simple, I've ordered a new hard drive that should come tomorrow, will let you know how it goes!

While I'm on the subject of Apple, today a new youtube channel was launched by the RNLI - it's called Shout! and is the latest initiative from the charity aimed towards changing the perception of the youth in today's media. We are going to be setting some challenges for all of you people in internetland to take part in, which will hopefully result in us raising enough money to buy the RNLI a lifeboat! At the same time we will be trying to get the story into the papers - our own positive headlines.

'What does that have to do with Apple?' I hear you ask! (I don't) WELL, for the first challenge we decided to lobby a well known company, and we chose Apple. The idea is that so many people, young people especially, spend their money on this company's products that they might be willing to give a little something back, if we show them how much we love them. So we're asking for video responses, but here - it's all better explained in the launch video.

I hope some of you will be able to get involved by spreading the word and/or making a video response. Hopefully I'll be able to do one soon... Depends how tomorrow goes really!

xxx

Changed my mind... Already

I've put the songs together and I think they do work with some of the instrumentals in there, so the track list right now looks like this:

Piano from the 'my day' blog - Needs a name!
Don't Go
Dance On
Ideas
What Did You Do Today?
Open D
Alaska
When I See You Again
Burn Forever

I think I'm just going to call it 'Rarities 07 -09' Because then I can do a similar thing if I have a bunch of unreleased songs in a year or two, and continue the name so they will all appear next to each other and in order in people's itunes.

So all I'm waiting for is a good version of Alaska which hopefully I can get tomorrow either from Jack or off my external - can't link that to my PC because it's firewire, but I'll take it to the Apple Store and do it there.

Jack is not well

Tomorrow I head to Leicester where I have an appointment at the Apple Store so they can take a look at Jack who is not well at all. I fear the cost of fixing him may turn out to be more than he's worth (economically... He will always have a place in my heart as my first ever mac!) Which means buying a new iMac. On the plus side I was planning on this purchase so it's not come out of nowhere and it needed to happen anyway, but I don't really have the money for it yet. However I have decided that I want to get the best that I can even if it means being poor for a while, because the iMac is the centre of my studio and over time I want to build the best studio that I can, which means buying the best equipment, even if I can't afford to get it all at once.

So I need money, and I've been thinking of ways to get it. People have suggested setting up a 'chipin' which basically means people donate money to you... I don't love this idea because people are giving you something for nothing. So what I think I'm going to do it release some of my songs that so far have been unavailable to buy on this new site I've found. It's called bandcamp and you can set it up so people can download songs or albums for any price. So I'll put together some tracks, put it up there and people can enter the amount they want to pay for it, which will basically be their donation towards my new iMac.

What I'm not sure of is which songs to use. I was thinking of using all of the instrumental tunes I have, there are four so far and I could do another one to put in a promotional video, but I wonder whether people would pay much for instrumentals. I do have a few full songs recorded - Alaska, Don't Go, Dance On, Burn Forever, When I See You Again... I was planning to release these properly at some point but I could use them for this? Do you think more people would go for that? I could do both separately, or I could put all of them together. I actually have a video for Alaska ready to go... If I can get it off Jack.

Right. I think I'll start with the instrumentals, I'll do one more - obviously I can't record properly, they will all be just camera recordings, but the mic is pretty good. Then I'll have five instrumental tracks, I'll put them together as an EP and people can buy it for any amount. Then later I still have the option of doing the same with the full songs, if someone donated a load for the instrumentals they can always get the songs for 1p so in effect they have made the same donation and have all 10 tracks.

Sound like a plan?

If anyone has any thoughts on this, or has any other ideas for me to make some iMac money (inb4 get a pc instead... Get out of my life) then feel free to comment or email me.

xxx

Tired / Broken

Right now I'm just tired of being happy.

I'm all broken.